'Pretty Twinklings'

How to cheer up a friend without sounding like a sap? Too often pep talks come off fake, obligatory and patronizing, as though composed by AI. How to preserve the essential human touch, the fondness we feel for someone we care about, without being glib or laying it on too thick? I don’t know. Charles Lamb delivers a template for such an effort in the letter he wrote to his friend Robert Lloyd on November 13, 1798: “You say that ‘this World to you seems drain’d of all its sweets!’ At first I had hoped you only meant to insinuate the high price of Sugar! but I am afraid you meant more.”

 All of us see only ugliness and waste on occasion, but there’s a class of people unwilling or unable to see anything else. I once worked for an editor who returned from his first visit to Montreal and complained about the scratchiness of the hotel towels. Lamb goes on:

 

“O Robert, I don’t know what you call sweet. Honey and the honeycomb, roses and violets, are yet in the earth. The sun and moon yet reign in Heaven, and the lesser lights keep up their pretty twinklings. Meats and drinks, sweet sights and sweet smells, a country walk, spring and autumn, follies and repentance, quarrels and reconcilements, have all a sweetness by turns.”

 

Citing examples of “sweetness” – the gratuitous blessings of the world – is strategically shrewd. Who could argue with such bounty? Plenty of people, you say? You’re right, of course. But specifics, rather than airy encouragement and appeals to another’s sense of logic, seem likelier to buoy a burdened spirit. Lamb continues:

 

“Good humour and good nature, friends at home that love you, and friends abroad that miss you, you possess all these things, and more innumerable, and these are all sweet things. . . . You may extract honey from everything; do not go a gathering after gall. . . . I assure you I find this world a very pretty place.”

 

Lamb earned the right to encourage a friend and have his words carry conviction. Three years earlier, he had spent six weeks in an asylum. In 1796 his sister Mary fatally stabbed their mother. For the rest of his life, Lamb, who never married, remained her legal guardian. Consider this passage from “New Year’s Eve” (1821) among his Essays of Elia:

 

“A new state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with life?”